From Blue to Black Marble

Blue Earth

Prior to NASA space flights we can only imagine what the whole planet would look like in a single picture. So in 1972, a crew of Apollo 17 took a photograph from inside the spacecraft on its way to the moon. Today, that picture is probably the most famous and most distributed picture the Earth – It is called the Blue Marble.

Black Marble

With the boom of the technology in the last decades, we have gone a good distance in space and space photography. And while most can only take photos of outer space from Earth, there are some, like the guy of Apollo 17, who does the other way around – Take pictures of Earth from outer space. Not everybody can do this but thanks to Google it did all that for us. Today, we have detailed photos of the every corner our planet available to everyone. But Google was not contended with just that, so just lately, after a collaboration with NASA, and NOAA, it released the most detailed possible image of Earth at night – Black Marble.

Check the page here.

At first look, I found a few interesting things.

1.    If more lights would mean more progressive areas, than this is also like an economic map. Try to compare North and South Korea.

2.       What are those captured huge collection lights from places that are supposed to be open sea?